Camille Goldstone-Henry On AI Technology Preventing Biodiversity And Habitat Loss
Camille Goldstone Henry is a wildlife scientist, Kamilaroi woman and CEO & founder of biodiversity tech start-up, Xylo Systems.
She has been lucky enough to work with endangered species around the world in her wildlife conservation career, including Tasmanian devils and Sumatran tigers. Founded by Camille in 2020, Xylo Systems is a cloud-based platform using artificial intelligence to connect, track and manage conservation projects so that we can tackle the extinction crisis faster, together. Xylo Systems is already an award-winning start-up and Camille has been awarded honours including the Women’s Weekly Woman of the Future award 2021, NSW Young Woman of the Year finalist 2022, and Women in AI Trailblazer and Climate in AI Awards 2022 for her passion in bringing together for wildlife and tech to turbocharge wildlife conservation and preserve biodiversity for future generations.
Camille discusses how innovative technology can intervene with the extinction of animals and their native habitats and key lessons learnt through participating in the HATCH Taronga Accelerator Program.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?
[Camille Goldstone-Henry] - I am a wildlife conservation scientist. I think like most people working in the wildlife or conservation space, I've had a passion for wildlife my entire life. I grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales on the coast, but I'm currently based in Sydney about two hours North. I spent a lot of time as a child in nature, along the coast surfing and camping. My parents were really big on sustainability, so they embedded in me from a young age the importance of conserving our natural environment and principles of sustainability. I think that really inspired me to begin a career in wildlife conservation. Off I went to university, I studied a Bachelor of Animal and Veterinary Bioscience and was then lucky enough to land a job working as a conservation scientist in the zoo industry. In that role, I managed really large conservation projects here in Australia and also around the world. The Tasmanian Devil is probably my largest piece of work today; my job was to manage our insurance population. We had an insurance population of Tasmanian Devils in captivity because of the devil facial tumour disease in the wild. We thought they were going to go extinct, so I was in charge of managing the genetics and demographics of that insurance population and also the larger meta population. I worked closely with governments, academics and other conservation not for profits to ensure that we maintained that species in the wild. I did that for a number of critically endangered species here in Australia, but I became quite frustrated working in the space on these really large stakeholder projects. It can become really inefficient and ineffective. Information sharing became quite hard. It was all very manual, which meant if we had any major natural disasters that took potential release sites or conservation sites offline, we didn't have an easy way to adjust and be flexible around our goals for these endangered species. That's really what inspired me to start Xylo Systems. But I think the real trigger was that I am currently studying an MBA, and throughout my studies, I've learned a lot about other industries, the corporate sector, retail and how these industries are using data and artificial intelligence to really change the world in which we live. A great example is the retail industry now uses customer data to hyper target and make a consumer buying process really personalised.
They do this using AI and data, and I thought, "why aren't we using this technology for good?" Why can't we apply this technology to solve one of our biggest biodiversity crises humanity has ever seen?
That was the real trigger for creating Xylo Systems; it took my frustration of working in the conservation space and paired it with technology and seeing that as a way forward in which we can reach our conservation goals much faster, and also with the current resources we have. It's really a game changer for the industry that I'm so excited about.
As the founder and CEO of Xylo Systems, can you tell us a bit more about the venture's core social mission and the product it offers?
Our mission and absolute north star is to turbocharge conservation globally using the power of data and AI. We want to give organisations and businesses the tools to become nature positive, as fast as possible. We're seeing a huge movement towards net zero, which is so fantastic, but net zero isn't necessarily enough. I don't want to discredit the work that's being done in climate reductions and the net zero space, because it's absolutely critical. But when we often talk about the climate emergency and human impacts on the climate, we often leave out a critical factor, which is biodiversity and the holistic environment in which we all live. We really want to help organisations, including those that are currently working on preserving biodiversity (we're talking about governments, conservation organisations, not for profits, academics and universities, but also the corporate, development and mining sectors) to become nature positive. We are really focused on giving everyone the tools to contribute to preserving what biodiversity we have left and becoming nature positive. Our core product aggregates environmental and conservation data onto a platform, and we present that conservation data in visualisations. Our AI algorithms also mine the data that's being fed into our system from open source data sets, our clients' internal data sets and also from data we're generating ourselves to find wildlife stories hidden in numbers, to find out what has happened in the past and what can we do in the future? This is to ensure we can preserve those critically endangered species we have not just here in Australia but around the world. Then, we can provide decision makers and the corporate sector with strategies and recommendations on how they can preserve biodiversity or absolutely minimise their impact on biodiversity. That's really our core social mission, and our product is turbo charging wildlife conservation using technology.
How prevalent is the issue of endangered and threatened species, and what are some of the leading causes?
The issue is huge, and I'm not quite sure if the general public knows how dire of a situation, we are in. Australia is actually home to a very embarrassing statistic. We have the largest mammal extinction rate in the world, which means the most mammals have gone extinct in Australia as a result of human impact compared to any other region in the world. That is huge. We've lost one hundred species since European colonisation, and we're also globally losing a species every three to five minutes, which is absolutely mind boggling. That is a lot of species, we're talking here everything from plants and insects all the way up to mammals, so you can see how dire this situation is. I think recently most people saw off the back of the 2019 and 2020 bushfires the impact it had on our native species. 3 billion animals died or were displaced, another mindboggling number. That's really hard to wrap your head around. The figures from a platform called The Threatened Species Index indicates in New South Wales we've lost about 75% of our biodiversity in 45 years. That is huge, and we're on a downward trajectory. The main leading cause is of course climate change. That is happening globally. We had a species called the Campbell Island Rodent, which was Australia's first species to go extinct as a result of climate change, and it was found on a small island in the Torres Strait. That is going to be an ongoing thing for a lot of our species here in this country, but really the biggest leading causes of population declines include introduced species such as feral cats, foxes and rabbits, degradation of habitat and loss of habitat from development. This is a really big issue for frogs and koalas. For frogs, it's really dire at the moment, because they are our canary in the coal mine. We're seeing huge declines in frogs because of urban sprawl across our country, and if we start losing our frogs, we're in serious trouble ourselves.
We rely on ecosystem services and nature for so much of the way in which humans live. We rely on it for our food system, for fresh water, the economy, our spiritual health and wellbeing.
Nature is critical, and so we need to be addressing some of these leading causes, like climate change, introduced species and habitat loss, so that we can save ourselves.
As an alum of the HATCH Taronga Accelerator Program, what were some of the key lessons you took away from the program that would be useful for other founders or people seeking to create a social impact?
If I can indulge myself for just for a second, I want to let you know how much I loved going through the HATCH Accelerator. If you have an environmental, sustainability or wildlife focused start-up, the HATCH Accelerator is truly life changing for your trajectory in social impact and social enterprise. The biggest lesson I took away from the accelerator was the importance of behaviour change when you're building your social enterprise. The Taronga Zoo team actually did a fantastic session on this. They are leaders in behaviour change in terms of the environment, sustainability and wildlife.
It's not enough to just disrupt any sector or industry you're working in. In our case, where we're disrupting how we manage wildlife globally using technology, you also need to bring people along for the ride.
What we have noticed along Xylo System’s journey is the huge gap between technical knowledge and where technology is. There's not a lot of technical knowledge in the conservation space, because everyone is so busy and stretched just trying to save these species. They don't have the time to go out and learn about all of these incredible emerging technologies that can help them save time and money. A huge part of our journey has been working with the conservation community to educate them on the benefits and opportunities that lie in working with technologies like artificial intelligence, and that is a behaviour change piece for us. Not only do we offer our product, we also are offering and going to offer more resources to upskill wildlife conservationists, governments and academics in this space so that we can all tackle the extinction crisis with the best tools that we have. I think that behaviour change piece applies to any social enterprise. You're always going to have to educate people, whether it be the general public, investors, stakeholders on what it is that you are doing and what the root causes of it are so that you can bring them along for the ride.
Where do you believe there are opportunities for change makers to collaborate and work together to help conserve wildlife and habitats?
There are many areas for collaboration in this space, and I think we're particularly lucky here in Australia that we have a lot of change makers working on fixing the environment, sustainability, wildlife and habitats. HATCH is just one of the accelerator programs that helps bring all of those concepts together, but I'm also part of the Fishburners Tech For Good Hub, and there's a whole suite of incredible change makers working on these problems. The opportunity for collaboration and also the collaboration that is currently going on really helps us all further our goals, because we've all got the same mission. We all want to preserve the environment; we all want to leave the world a better place than how we found it. One way in which I'm collaborating with other change makers is by working with other female founders in this space. I think the Climate Salad Tech Report came out recently, and that is an industry wide scope on what's happening with climate technology in Australia and what start-ups are working on in this space. Almost 50% of climate tech founders are women, which is comparable to the wider start-up space where only about 25% of the entire space are female founders. There are a lot of female founders working and collaborating in this space, because we all need to work together to overcome some of the barriers we face compared to our male colleagues, and that includes things like access to investment.
Less than 4% of venture capital funding goes towards female founders, and it's even less for those working in the environment, wildlife and sustainability spaces. I'm working with a lot of female founders in this space to compare notes, make introductions to investors, share opportunities so we all can realise our ideas and visions.
With the rising tide floats all boats, and that's where I really love working with the female founders in this space. But there are so many other facets to conserving wildlife and habitats, and so many change makers working in this wider ecosystem. We've got a really exciting partnership with a cloud tech start-up based in Tasmania. The reason why these guys are so exciting is Xylo Systems is based in the cloud, so it's a huge part of what we're building. This start-up called Firmus is operating a close to carbon neutral cloud, which is completely unheard of. If you think about cloud computing, it takes up a lot of energy and resources, and most of those are from non-renewable sources. I don't want to name any names, but you can probably name some of the really big cloud providers out there, so we've partnered with this cloud start-up to make sure we are operating our platform as close to carbon neutral as possible. I'm not going to try and talk about the technology they've got that helps them become carbon neutral, but it really is incredible, and I think that shows you the potential of how change makers are collaborating in Australia to really bring us closer to net zero and hopefully in the future become net positive.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?
It's so hard to fit this answer into the short time we have, because there are so many out there and I would just love to give them all a shout out. If you're listening to this podcast, I love you all and you're doing great work. But for some of my favourite initiatives at the moment, there's firstly a start-up called Carapac, and their founder, Kimberly Bolton, actually won the HATCH Accelerator last year. She's doing a really incredible job of tackling the plastic problem and plastic in our oceans. Carapac are taking crustacean shell waste and making in into a biodegradable, antimicrobial alternative plastic. This plastic can be used for example in supermarkets where you currently get your baby spinach in a plastic bag. In the future, that will be Carapac's biodegradable, antimicrobial plastic, which not only preserves the shelf life of that food, but you can also plant in your plants at home when you're finished with it, which fertilises them. It's really incredible, she has this image of a dying house plant and a flourishing house plant, and she put her Carapac product in the flourishing plant. It is such a cool job she's doing, because she's tackling two problems there, the crustacean shell waste problem, and also the plastic problem.
We're also working with an organisation called Environmetrics, and they're a start-up out of Queensland who are using satellite data to help mines manage their natural assets and sustainability.
They're operating in a very similar space to us, but are using satellite data, which is really cool. They can map the impacts that mines have on the natural environment around them and help them better manage habitat regeneration or reduce the impacts of mining on the environment around the actual mine. That's another really cool start-up operating in Australia. The final one I'm just so excited about is RePlated, another HATCH alumni. The founder, Naomi Tarszisz has developed a Tupperware container that replaces a takeout plastic container. So, when you go and get Thai food in your plastic container, Naomi has developed an industry standardised Tupperware container that can be used over and over again, so you can get take away more sustainably. She's taking over the world here and she's everywhere in Sydney. Check them out, they've got some really cool products.
To finish off what books or resources would you recommend our listeners check out?
If you're interested in biodiversity, a really good place to start is a podcast called The Business Of Biodiversity, and you can get that wherever you get your podcasts. That gives you a really good overview of all the innovation happening in the Australian biodiversity and wildlife spaces. As a start-up founder, it's very much a roller coaster starting your own business and managing the uncertainty of a start-up, particularly a tech start-up. A book I read recently is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and it talks about the answers a lot of the other start-up books don't have.
What do you do when you're trying to hire the right person, or what do you do when you need to fire an entire department, which are really scary things you have to think about as a start-up founder?
We're seeing in the tech space in Australia a lot of layoffs, and it is hard economically. I think for the start-up founder, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a must read book. It's given me a lot of answers I haven't been able to find anywhere else. Finally, and I want to touch on this because I touched on female founders before and there's a lot going on in the world at the moment in terms of gender equality and women's rights. Another book I'm reading right now is called Invisible Women, and as a data nerd I love this book. It's about the gender data gap and how this world is not exactly built for women, so I'd really recommend that if you're interested in data and the artificial intelligence space.
